Dance with the Devil

“If you'll give me your keys and tell me where the suitcases are, you won't have to get out of the Rover again.”
        “I'm putting you to a lot of trouble,” she said.
        “Nonsense.”
        “But I am.”
        He grinned. “Then I'll get even when we go up the mountain.” He pointed ahead at the narrow, snow-laden roadway which looked, suddenly, twice as steep and harrowing as it had earlier when she'd attempted to climb it in the Ford.
        He took her keys and got out, closed the door and clomped over to the Ford, opened the trunk and lifted out two cases which he brought back. A rear door of the Rover opened to admit the cases and, in a moment, the last two as well. He slammed it shut, locked it, got in behind the wheel again and gave her the keys.
        He said, “It's a good thing you decided not to force your way up in that car of yours. Even if you'd been lucky and made it most of the way to the top, you'd have gone over the edge on the last turn. It's a menace for the Rover, let alone for something with worn winter tires and a high speed rear end, like the Ford.”
        Swallowing hard at the prospect of having pitched over the brink in the old car, she said, “How long will it take to get up there, in this?”
        He looked ahead. “It's a mile and a quarter, but all steep and all icy. I'd say there's six to eight inches of snow…”
        She waited while he thought it out.
        “If I heed Bertha's warning and take it easy, we ought to be up there in fifteen or twenty minutes. All right?”
        “Fine,” she said.
        He looked at Owlsden, what they could see of it from this angle. “I don't think I'll ever understand why anyone would want to build a house in such an unapproachable place-or, for that matter, found an entire town in the middle of nowhere.”
        He slammed the Rover into gear.
        They jerked as the engine groaned and caught hold.
        They moved forward toward the road and the ascent to the Roxburgh estate at the top of the valley wall.
        Even the Rover wallowed a bit in the treacherous climb, though Mike Harrison did not seem to think the ascent was all that spectacular. While Katherine tried not to look out her window at the yawning pit that opened on her side of the road but found herself looking in fascination anyway, he talked amiably, as if they were out for a Sunday afternoon drive to admire the local scenery.
        At last, because talking about anything would be better than staring into the ever-growing chasm beside them, Katherine joined in the conversation and brought up the dead cat she had found in the barn.
        “Where was this barn?” he asked immediately, taking his eyes away from the road for a second.
        She told him. “It was absolutely terrible,” she said.
        “I can imagine.”
        “It was all that I could do to touch the poor thing, let alone to dig its grave. But, I guess, someone had to do it.”
        “You buried the cat?” he asked incredulously.
        Again, he took his eyes away from the road and looked at her. She wished he wouldn't do that.
        “Yes,” she said.
        “You shouldn't have.”
        The Land Rover slipped sideways with a ratcheting noise, toward the brink, corrected smoothly as Harrison touched the gas and shifted down a gear.
        “Whyever not?” she asked.
        She tried not to think about how close they had been to loosing a wheel over the abrupt lip of the berm. This situation was trying her optimism as badly as the descent down the other side of the valley had. Perhaps this was another omen, a warning to turn back, go home, find another job in a more conventional atmosphere.
        “The people who did that thing-the people who tortured and hung that cat are not sane, Katherine.”
        “I realize that,” she said.
        “Well, you should have gotten away from there as soon as you realized what had taken place.”
        “Someone had to bury the cat,” she insisted.
        “What if one of them-one of these Satanists had come back?”
        “I thought, once they'd used a place, they wouldn't be too open about returning to it. I didn't think those kind of people would show themselves in public, in daylight. They can't be proud of it, after all.”
        He nodded, still handling the wheel expertly as the Land Rover crawled laboriously along the snowy track toward the dark, towering mass of Owlsden